George Meredith

“ Richmond, permit me to apologize to you. I have to congratulate you, it appears. I was not aware.—However, the princess has done me the favour to enlighten me. How you will manage, I can't guess, but that is not my affair. I am a man of honour; and, on my honour, I conceived that I was invited here to decide, as my habit is, on the spot, if I would, or if I would not. I speak clearly to you, no doubt. There could be no hesitation in the mind of a man of sense. ”

“ But whatever the mood of our affections, so it is with us island wanderers: we cannot gaze over at England, knowing the old country to be close under the sea-line, and not hail it, and partly forget ourselves in the time that was. The smell of sea-air made me long for the white cliffs, the sight of the white cliffs revived pleasant thoughts of Riversley, and thoughts of Riversley thoughts of Janet, which were singularly and refreshingly free from self-accusations. ”

“ You don't give me an easy task, friend Harry.'
'If you believe in his generosity, Janet, should you be afraid to put it to proof?'
'Grandada's generosity, Harry? I do believe in it as I believe in my own life. It happens to be the very thing I must keep myself from rousing in him, to be of any service to you. Look at the old house!' She changed her tone. 'Looking on old Riversley with the eyes of my head even, I think I'm looking at something far away in the memory. Perhaps the deep red brick causes it. There never was a house with so many beautiful creepers. ”

“ The baroness coughed dryly.
I whispered: 'Does Prince Ernest—is he aware?'
'You are aware,' retorted the baroness, 'that what a man idolizes he won't see flaw in. Remember, I am something here, or I am nothing.'
The enigmatical remark was received by me decorously as a piece of merited chastisement. Nodding with gravity, I expressed regrets that the sea did not please her, otherwise I could have offered her a yacht for a cruise. She nodded stiffly. Her mouth shut up a smile, showing more of the door than the ray. ”

“ He had never seen the Princess Ottilia. And at night I thanked my grandfather. He bore himself, on the whole, like the good and kindly old gentleman Janet loved to consider him. He would not stand in my light, he said, recurring to that sheet-anchor of a tolerant sentence whenever his forehead began to gather clouds. He regretted that Janet was no better than her sex in her preference for rakes, and wished me to the deuce for bringing Heriot into the house, and not knowing when I was lucky. 'German grandchildren, eh!' he muttered. No Beltham had ever married a foreigner. ”

“ Do you know, Harry, I am not yet able to endure accidents and misadventures: I have not fortitude to meet them, or intelligence to account for them. They are little ironical laughter. Say we build so high: the lightning strikes us:—why build at all? The Summer fly is happier. ”

“ And now he remembered it was Colonel Goodwin and his daughter who had told him of having seen 'the fellow' engaged in playing Court-buffoon to a petty German prince, and performing his antics, cutting capers like a clown at a fair.
'Shame!' said Janet.
'Hear her!' The squire turned to me.
But she cried: 'Oh! grandada, hear yourself! or don't, be silent. If Harry has offended you, speak like one gentleman to another. ”

“ The moment you begin to move the individuals, they are puppets. 'Nothing but poetry, and I say it who do not read it'— (Chancellor von Redwitz is the speaker) 'nothing but poetry makes romances passable: for poetry is the everlastingly and embracingly human. Without it your fictions are flat foolishness, non-nourishing substance—a species of brandy and gruel!—diet for craving stomachs that can support nothing solider, and must have the weak stuff stiffened. Talking of poetry, there was an independent hereditary princess of Leiterstein in love with a poet!—a Leonora d'Este!—This was no Tasso. ”

“ I was the first with it; my 'Ottilia !' brought soon after 'Harry' on her lips, and an atmosphere about us much less Arctic.
'Ottilia, you have told me you wish me to go to England.'
'I have.'
'We shall be friends.'
'Yes, Harry; we cannot be quite divided; we have that knowledge for our present happiness.'
'The happy knowledge that we may have our bone to gnaw when food's denied. It is something. One would like possibly, after expulsion out of Eden, to climb the gates to see how the trees grow there. ”

“ We had our full draught of the divine self-oblivion which floated those ghosts of the two immortal lovers through the bounds of their purgatorial circle, and for us to whom the minutes were ages, as for them to whom all time was unmarked, the power of supreme love swept out circumstance. ”

“ Why, dearest princess, we have walked up and down here a dozen times and not seen it staring at us! Oh, my good heaven!' The letter was seized and opened, and Ottilia read:
'He who loves you with his heart has been cruelly used. They have shot him. He is not dead. He must not die. He is where he has studied since long. He has his medicine and doctors, and they say the bullet did not lodge. He has not the sight that cures. Now is he, the strong young man, laid helpless at anybody's mercy.'
She supped at her father's table, and amused the margravine and him alternately with cards and a sonata. ”

“ She complimented me for inheriting a spark of Roy's brilliancy.
I fancied there was a conspiracy to force me back from my pretensions by subjecting me to the contemplation of my bare self and actual condition. Had there been, I should have suffered from less measured strokes. The unconcerted design to humiliate inferiors is commonly successfuller than conspiracy.
The prince invited me to smoke with him, and talked of our gradual subsidence in England to one broad level of rank through the intermixture by marriage of our aristocracy, squirearchy, and merchants. ”

“ I tell you, Janet Ilchester 's the only girl alive who'll double the man she marries. I don't know another who wouldn't make the name of wife laugh the poor devil out of house and company. She's firm as a rock; and sweet as a flower on it! Will that touch you? Bah! Richie, let's talk like men. I feel for her because she's fond of you, and I know what it is when a girl like that sets her heart on a fellow. ”

“ I know nothing to equal the anguish of an examination of the basis of one's pride that discovers it not solidly fixed; an imposing, self-imposing structure, piled upon empty cellarage. It will inevitably, like a tree striking bad soil, betray itself at the top with time. ”

“ Some women can adapt themselves . . . they 're the happiest. All I meant to ask you is, whether your princess is like the rest of us?'
'Not at all,' said I, unconscious of hurting.
'Never mind. Don't be hard on Julia. She has the making of a good woman—a girl can see that; only she can't bear loneliness, and doesn't understand yet what it is to be loved by a true gentleman. Persons of that class can't learn it all at once.'
I was pained to see her in tears. Her figure was straight, and she spoke without a quaver of her voice.
'Heriot's an excellent fellow,' I remarked. ”

“ The Diet says, "Thou shalt not"; pre-eminently, "Thou shalt not mix thy blood with that of an impure race, nor with blood of inferiors." Hence, we have it what we see it, a translucent flood down from the topmost founts of time. So we revere it. "Qua man and woman," the Diet says, by implication, "do as you like, marry in the ditches, spawn plentifully. Qua prince and princess, No! Your nuptials are nought. Or would you maintain them a legal ceremony, and be bound by them, you descend, you go forth; you are no reigning sovereign, you are a private person." ”

“ She wore her hair in a plain knot, peculiarly neatly rounded away from the temples, which sometimes gave to a face not aquiline a look of swiftness. The face was mobile, various, not at all suggestive of bad temper, in spite of her frowns. The profile of it was less assuring than the front, because of the dark eyebrows' extension and the occasional frown, but that was not shared by the mouth, which was, I admitted to myself, a charming bow, running to a length at the corners like her eyebrows, quick with smiles. ”

“ Let any man on earth say she's not an angel, I flatten him dead as his lie. By the way, sir, I am bound in duty to inform you I am speaking of my wife.'
'To be sure you are, William, and a trim schooner-yacht she is.'
'She 's off, sir; she's off!'
I thought it time to throw in a word. 'Captain Bulsted, I should hold any man but you accountable to me for hinting such things of my friend.'
'Harry, your hand,' he cried, sparkling.
'Hum; his hand!' growled the squire. 'His hand's been pretty lively on the Continent, William. Here, look at this book, William, and the bundle o' cheques! ”

“ A man's pride is the front and headpiece of his character, his soul's support or snare. Look to it in youth. I have to thank the interminable hours on my wretched sick-bed for a singularly beneficial investigation of the ledger of my deeds and omissions and moral stock. Perhaps it has already struck you that one who takes the trouble to sit and write his history for as large a world as he can obtain, and shape his style to harmonize with every development of his nature, can no longer have much of the hard grain of pride in him. ”

“ Note the predicament of a lover who has a piece of dishonesty lurking in him. My chilled self-love had certainly the right to demand the explanation of her coldness, and I could very well guess that a word or two drawn from the neighbourhood of the heart would fetch a warmer current to unlock the ice between us, but feeling the coldness I complained of to be probably a suspicion, I fixed on the suspicion as a new and deeper injury done to my loyal love for her, and armed against that I dared not take an initiative for fear of unexpectedly justifying it by betraying myself. ”

“ An existence without colour, without anxious throbbing, without salient matter for thought, challenged contempt. But it was exceedingly funny. My aunt Dorothy, the squire, and Janet submitted to my transparent inward laughter at them, patiently waiting for me to share their contentment, in the deluded belief that the hour would come. ”

“ My aunt Dorothy blamed Julia. The squire thundered at Heriot; Janet, liking both, contented herself with impartial comments.
'I always think in these cases that the women must be the fools,' she said. Her affectation was to assume a knowledge of the world and all things in it. We rode over to Julia's cottage, on the outskirts of the estate now devolved upon her husband. Irish eyes are certainly bewitching lights. I thought, for my part, I could not do as the captain was doing, serving his country in foreign parts, while such as these were shining without a captain at home. ”

“ I should have been enraged at a martyr-like appearance on her part, for I demanded a sprightly devotion to my interests, considering love so holy a thing, that where it existed, all surrounding persons were bound to do it homage and service. We were thrown together a great deal in attending on poor old Sewis, who would lie on his pillows recounting for hours my father's midnight summons of the inhabitants of Riversley, and his little Harry's infant expedition into the world. ”

“ Our Peterborough is up at the chateau. The Frau Feldmarschall honours him with a farewell invitation: you have a private interview with the princess at midnight in the library, where you are accustomed to read, as a student of books should, my boy at a touch of the bell, or mere opening of the door, I see that Peterborough comes to you. ”

“ Self—self—self drew for thousands at a time; sometimes, as the squire's convulsive forefinger indicated, for many thousands within a week. It was incomprehensible to him until I, driven at bay by questions and insults, and perceiving that concealment could not long be practised, made a virtue of the situation by telling him (what he in fact must have seen) that my father possessed a cheque-book as well as I, and likewise drew upon the account. ”

“ She turned the tables on me for looking so powerful, though I was dying for a foreign princess.
'Oh! but that'll blow over,' she said; 'anything blows over as long as you don't go up to the altar'; and she eyed her ringed finger, woebegone, and flashed the pleasantest of smiles with the name of her William. Heriot, whom she always called Walter Heriot, was, she informed me, staying at Durstan Hall, the new great house, built on a plot of ground that the Lancashire millionaire had caught up, while the squire and the other landowners of the neighbourhood were sleeping. ”

“ She listened with interest to my discourse on the necessity of my being in Parliament before I could venture to propose formally for the hand of the princess, and undertook to bear the burden of all consequent negotiations with my grandfather. If she would but have allowed me to speak of Temple, instead of saying, 'Don't, Harry, I like him so much!' at the very mention of his name, I should have sincerely felt my indebtedness to her, and some admiration of her fine spirit and figure besides. I could not even agree with my aunt Dorothy that Janet was handsome. ”

“ What made me overleap the proper estimate of your rank! I can't tell; but now that I know better the kind of creature—the man who won your esteem when you knew less of the world!'—
'Hush! I have an interest in him, and do not suffer him to be spurned,' Ottilia checked me. 'I, too, know him better, and still, if he is dragged down I am in the dust; if he is abused the shame is mine.' Her face bloomed. ”

“ The grim and taciturn Baroness Turckems, sitting opposite to her, sighed audibly.
'Has the princess been trying to convert you?' the margravine asked her.
'Trying? no, madam. Reading? yes.'
'My good Turckems! you do not get your share of sleep?'
'It is her Highness the princess who despises sleep.'
'See there the way with your free-thinkers! They commence by treading under foot the pleasantest half of life, and then they impose their bad habits on their victims. Ottilia! Ernest! ”

“ I said nothing of my chagrin at the behaviour of the pair who had furnished my first idea of the romantic beauty of love.
'Why does she talk twice as Irish as she used to, Heriot?'
'Just to coax the world to let her be as nonsensical as she likes. She's awfully dull; she has only her nonsense to amuse her. I repeat: soldiers and sailors oughtn't to marry. I'm her best friend. I am, on my honour: for I 'm going to make Billy give up the service, since he can't give her up. ”